Ask A Music Critic: Can You Please Review This Pat McAfee Album?

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This week’s question didn’t come from one person, but rather many, many people that have asked me in the past few days, in so many words: Can you please review the ridiculous new album by ESPN’s Pat McAfee?

The short answer is “of course I can, though I must also insist on making a larger point about How Things Are Right Now.”

For those who are unfamiliar: Pat McAfee is a former NFL kicker who is currently one of the most prominent voices on ESPN, the sports cable network that like MTV was once beloved in the eighties and nineties, but now has fully devolved into unwatchable reality TV starring a shrinking number of personalities that nobody on Earth actually likes but nonetheless scan as “famous.” Even those populating Pat’s own inner circle apparently can’t stand the man, as nobody talked him out of releasing The Diary Of A Polarizing Figure, a mélange of shopworn country, boilerplate trap, and the sort of uncut and unrelenting grievance that only a man who is reportedly set to make $60 million per year to wear tank tops and look relatively cogent while standing next to the oversized slab of molded Silly Putty that is AJ Hawk’s face can reasonably muster.

Before we get into this, I need to register my usual reservations when it comes to pans of self-evidently garbage albums. 1) I don’t necessarily relish reviewing a preordained artistic disaster, even when it’s made by a rich malignant doofus, the easiest and most satisfying target there is; 2) The very easiness of the target is why I don’t relish it; 3) Because mocking rich malignant doofuses, while undoubtedly fun and popular on the internet, often distracts from some deeper truth that’s more interesting and probably more meaningful.